Paolo Javier and David Mason, Fel Santos: I of Newtown, 2018. Multimedia installation (Super 8 film, digital video with sound, and 7-channel audio), durations variable. Courtesy of the artists. Installed at the LeFrak City branch of the Queens Library.

Paolo Javier and David Mason, Fel Santos: I of Newtown, 2018. Multimedia installation (Super 8 film, digital video with sound, and 7-channel audio), durations variable. Courtesy of the artists. Installed at the LeFrak City branch of the Queens Library.

Paolo Javier and David Mason, Fel Santos: I of Newtown, 2018. Multimedia installation (Super 8 film, digital video with sound, and 7-channel audio), durations variable. Courtesy of the artists. Installed at the LeFrak City branch of the Queens Library.

Paolo Javier and David Mason, Fel Santos: I of Newtown, 2018. Multimedia installation (Super 8 film, digital video with sound, and 7-channel audio), durations variable. Courtesy of the artists. Installed at the LeFrak City branch of the Queens Library.

Paolo Javier and David Mason, Fel Santos: I of Newtown, 2018. Multimedia installation (Super 8 film, digital video with sound, and 7-channel audio), durations variable. Courtesy of the artists. Installed at the LeFrak City branch of the Queens Library.

Paolo Javier and David Mason, Fel Santos: I of Newtown, 2018. Multimedia installation (Super 8 film, digital video with sound, and 7-channel audio), durations variable. Courtesy of the artists. Installed at the LeFrak City branch of the Queens Library.

David Mason

I've been working under the name of Listening Center for most of this decade. It's an entity which has enabled me to step away from real life and deal entirely with a parallel world, which is governed by its own laws. It mostly concerns a certain amorphous quality of states of past and future. I'm committed in this capacity to electro-acoustic music which I chose as the medium for the sounds from this world, and more specifically analogue synthesis, which I find infinitely variable and expressive for that end. Fel Santos, which is the collaboration of Listening Center with Paolo Javier, is a sort of collision between this world and the imagined subjective space of the poet Fel, and an interaction with his private language. Since our meeting at a Nigel Kneale symposium at the Colloquium for Unpopular Culture at NYU several years ago, we have gradually found ways in which to bring our ideas and practices together in synthesis; each phase of the work tends to be a response of one to the other in an ongoing dialogue. The site of the installation at the LeFrak Queens Library branch is like a dream come true, as Listening Center found its roots in a lost culture of audio-visual pedagogy; a library would always be the perfect venue.

I always try to explore a tension between past and future; this sort of engagement can easily be dismissed as nostalgia, but it is more a question of getting beyond that psychic condition to a more reflective, self-aware space where alternative subjectivities can be engendered or encountered. It's something that I hope comes through the work, so I don't want to make a big deal out of it—if people pick up on it, that's great.

Dealing with sound every day, volumes are an integral part of the structure of my work, as in music, one volume is added to another—one could say that my work is nothing but a sum of volumes. Then there is the serial quality of my and other people's work, which can be divided up into several volumes, each relating to a common area, either temporally, thematically, or according to special conditions. That volumes generally contain something is significant. They contain sound; also, inversely, silence. They can be static, or dynamic. They contain the physical attributes of physical objects in space, and depending on the material found inside a volume, they can contain the directions for our journey towards the knowledge or metaphysical attributes of things.

In your response you make clear that Fel is a project by you and Paolo, while Paolo himself is more ambiguous.

In your response you make clear that Fel is a project by you and Paolo, while Paolo himself is more ambiguous.

The nature of Fel Santos is simultaneously both that of a subjective and a structural entity which encapsulates and informs our work. Through this inextricable relationship, Fel serves both as a point of reference but also a method of conduction for our collaboration. While confusing, it is a necessary tension which is not easily discarded or explained.

Can you tell us a bit about your influences?

There are so many that I will confine myself here to musical ones: my training is in jazz (drumming) so I'm very influenced by the whole history of jazz and its exponents, including its anthropological roots. To name a few who are focal points for me personally—Tony Williams, Elvin Jones, Max Roach. I'm interested in early electronic music, such as that generated by Delia Derbyshire and Daphne Oram at the BBC Radiophonic Workshop. I also admire Bach, Olivier Messiaen, Sun Ra, Eliane Radigue, Zdeněk Liška—individuals who compose in completely different ways but who each have something unique to say.

Can you tell us a bit about your influences?

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David Mason (b. 1976, Dublin, Ireland) studied music at the Hochschule fur Musik Köln, Germany, and was awarded an Irish Arts Council grant to study at Parsons School of Design at The New School in New York, where he earned a BFA in Jazz and Contemporary Music (2000). He has released several albums under the name of Listening Center, including Paths and Surfaces (Temporary Tapes, 2018); Ur’lyeh/Aklopolis, a collaboration with Paolo Javier (Texte und Töne, 2016); Then it was Now (Polytechnic Youth, 2016); Aural Assignments (Polytechnic Youth, 2016); Other Voices 02 (Ghost Box, 2014); Cycles and Other Phenomena (This is Care of/Deep Distance, 2014); Projections (Ghost Box, 2013); and Example One (This is Care of/ Polytechnic Youth, 2011). In 2018 he completed a score for the film The Humorist (dir. Michael Idov, Russia/Czech Republic/Latvia), and since 2016 he has contributed extensively to A Year In The Country, an ongoing quarterly compilation of hauntological musical explorations. He has performed internationally with Listening Center and in New York at the Clocktower Gallery, MoMA PS1, and Queens Museum.